Navarro probed the ashes with his right hand.
“How old, Tommy?”
“Two, three hours.”
Musselwhite looked southeast along the Apache’s trail twisting through the brush and dipping into a swale where five cottonwoods flashed in the late-afternoon sun. “We’re gettin’ close.”
Tixier was chewing jerky in his saddle and casting his brown eyes at his horse sniffing the breeze. “My mare—she smells ’em.”
Navarro snorted, mounting his buckskin, then reaching across and snagging a stick of jerky from Dallas’ open shirt pocket. “It’s you she smells, you dirty half-breed!”
“No,” Tixier said, waiting, studying his horse as the others pulled out. “It’s ’Paches, all right.”
They found the body of the dead man’s partner among the cottonwoods, stripped and hacked apart, two young coyotes circling the carcass. Leaving the coyotes to their carrion, they continued across the valley, crossed the ridge beyond, and found the headquarters of a small ranch operation still burning, the sooty smoke a dark column against the sky’s fading light.
Three dead men and three dead horses were strewn about the yard, and farther along they came upon six dead cows and a dead vaquero, the young cowboy’s entrails strewn for nearly a hundred yards across the rocks and sage.
“Savages,” Captain Ward said as they rode past the carnage.
“You ain’t seen nothin’,” Musselwhite replied.
On the other side of the valley, they followed a dry creekbed up among high, craggy peaks spotted with mesquite and pinion. The sunlight was weakening, and the pines and cliffs shaded the trail.
When they’d been riding along the wash for an hour, Navarro halted his horse and lifted his head to listen. Faintly, the sound of Indian chanting and a slowly beating drum came to his ears.
He couldn’t see much, as the wash was on his left and a high wall of granite on his right. He dismounted and retrieved his field glasses from his saddlebags. He tossed his reins to Musselwhite, walked up the saddle they’d been climbing, and disappeared around a bend.
Behind him, Tixier dismounted and sniffed the air. “Smell that?” he said to Musselwhite and Ward. “Roasting mule.”
A quarter hour later, Navarro came back. The others had dismounted and loosened their saddle cinches, giving their horses a rest.
Navarro said, “Far as I can tell, they’ve bivouacked atop Gray Rock. They probably posted guards, so we’ll leave the horses here and walk the rest of the way.”
“Ah, Apacheria,” Musselwhite said ironically as he mashed out his cigarette with his boot toe. “I have so many fond memories.”
Chapter 11
Navarro grabbed his reins, led his buckskin a hundred feet back along the trail, then followed a game path into the wash. When he and the others had tethered the horses and the mule to roots and shrubs, they grabbed their canteens and shucked their rifles from their saddle boots. Musselwhite sat down to lace his mocassins.
“Think ole Nan-dash is gonna remember us, Tommy?” Tixier asked, his grin showing the gold tooth in his dark, angular face. His short, scruffy beard was dust-glazed, his weathered sombrero pulled low on his forehead.
“Well, I would hope so,” Navarro said with a wry smile, “after all we meant to each other.”
He climbed out of the wash and tramped along the trail. Behind him, Ward turned to Tixier. “What’d he mean by that?”
“A few years ago, we spent a whole winter prospecting right under his nose,” Tixier said. “He got onto us eventually, though, and we had one hell of a time gettin’ out of there. A year later, we ran him down for the Army, and the bluecoats corralled him on the reservation.”
They climbed several ridges and crawled through a ravine. The sun fell and the night gathered rapidly, offering a refreshing chill. There was no moon yet, but several stars kindled in the east. Coyotes yammered on the higher peaks, and a blue jay shrieked down the ridge to their right.
Occasionally as they walked, coming out of trees or topping a rise, they saw their destination—the boulder-strewn granite scarp the whites called Gray Rock, standing several hundred feet above the low apron slopes around it. The natives, who saw the peak as sacred, had been holding religious ceremonies on its crest for centuries.
As the men tramped toward the mountain’s base, the drums, rattles, and chants drifting down from the peak pricked the hair on the back of their necks.
They waited until good dark, when the guards posted on the jagged rock formations along the mountain’s crest couldn’t so easily see them, then climbed the trail twisting along its base. The trail was sheathed in boulders, cedars and pines, but in places the trail was exposed to men looking down from the mountain’s rim.
The last quarter mile was a hard climb over boulders, then up over the lava mushrooms and steep granite walls. Twice they had to avoid the roving, rifle-wielding pickets smoking their pungent Mexican tobacco.
The drums and chants were louder now, as though coming from only a few yards away. The musk of roasting mule and the tang of pine smoke hung heavy in the chill air. A crimson glow flickered across the distant pines stippling the mountain’s saucer-shaped, rock-ringed crest.
Ten feet ahead of Tixier, Navarro stole along a lava bed, then stopped suddenly. A rasp sounded to his right. Throwing up a hand for the others to freeze, he turned toward the sound.
An Indian sat not twelve feet away, perched on a flat boulder, a rifle draped across his thighs. The brave faced the canyon, away from Navarro, long hair wafting in the breeze. He was smoking a cigarette. The breeze blew the smoke away from Tom, but he caught a faint whiff of the pungent tobacco now. He smelled the man, too—the rancid sweat and bear grease and the musky odor of horse and mule.
Navarro stared at the man’s back, pondering. He glanced back at Tixier, a silhouette standing motionless ten feet behind him, on a low rise of rock. Musselwhite and Ward stood several feet behind him, rifles raised. Dallas shrugged.
Navarro laid his rifle flat on the ground, pulled his dagger from his belt sheath, and crept slowly up the rocks. When he was three feet from the guard, the man coughed suddenly, blowing smoke, bending forward over his rifle, and turning his head to his right.
Spying the man behind him, the guard’s head jerked toward Navarro and up. Tom leapt forward and buried the dagger deep in the man’s lower back, severing the spine. Navarro wrapped his left arm around the man’s mouth, pulling him off the boulder and holding him until his death spasms ceased.
Tom wiped his knife blade on the man’s leggings and looked around. Fifty yards beyond, the fire’s glow flicked across the rocky escarpments and pines, licking at the black sky.
Navarro sheathed the knife, picked up his rifle, and waved the others on. He stole along the lava flow, across a dip, then climbed a boulder-strewn ridge and crawled out over a lip of pocked boulders and wind-gnarled cedars, the fire flaming high in a low, saucer-shaped hollow a hundred feet below.
The large, pyramidal blaze was ringed by twenty-five or thirty Apaches, all facing away from Navarro. Chanting to the drums and rattles that rose like God’s angry heartbeat, they marched in place, arms raised above their heads, some wielding spears.
Before the group, a middle-aged man knelt before a smaller fire, sprinkling a dustlike substance over the flames. This was Nan-dash, a little grayer and more lined than Navarro remembered, but still square-shouldered and lean-waisted, hawk-nosed, pinched-lipped, his tiny zealot’s eyes set close.
He wore a beaded deerskin vest and an umber headband. A medicine pouch hung from a leather thong around his neck. His silver-streaked hair hung loose, his forehead and cheekbones slashed with war paint.